The minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun. –Iain M. Banks, Excession

Sacha Chats with Jānis Mancēviĉs

Sacha Chua has another Emacs chat up. This time it's with Jānis Mancēviĉs. It's a far ranging talk but one of the interesting aspects is Mancēviĉs's use of Org mode for Literate Programming. He and his team mate use Org to pass around their code and documentation and then tangle the code for compilation. Mancēviĉs talks a bit about the benefits of Literate Programming and why they use it even though the up-front costs are a little greater. My impression is that he uses the Literate Programming paradigm not so much to produce finished documentation à la Knuth but to keep information about the algorithms and functions together with the code.

Another nice strategy that Mancēviĉs uses is cold folding. I used to use that occasionally with Vim but forgot about it when I moved to Emacs. Org mode has built-in folding, of course, but the more general Emacs folding can useful in non-Org files such as your .emacs, programming source, or text files.

The video is a little over an hour so plan accordingly. As with all of Chua's Emacs chats, you're apt to learn a thing or two so it will be worth your time.

Your comment made me realize that the reason I haven't bothered with code folding in Emacs is because of two other capabilities in Emacs. (1) Org mode covers almost all cases where I want to fold things away and (2) the other cases are covered by narrowing.

I suppose folding might be useful in some situation not covered by Org or narrowing but I haven't come across one yet.

http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

I used to use allout in my Emacs config, and then I moved to using Org Mode. I like Org Mode more - proper headings! links! HTML export! =) But yeah, folding is useful for regular source code too...